The American luminary's On Behalf of Nature is a weird but haunting piece,
says Ivan Hewett

Meredith Monk, long-standing luminary of the American avant-garde, and maker of exotically strangetheatrepieces, has a new cause.

She’s into Nature. Or to be more exact, she’s intrigued by the idea of being a “spokesperson for non-human entities communicating to the human realm through dance and song,” to quote a line from the writer Gary Snyder that inspired her. Oh, and she hates waste, and wanted to make a show that creates none.

As causes go, these are not exactly contentious. And Monk’s show avoids the awkward political questions that arise the minute you try to tackle environmental issues in the real world. In fact it seemed to avoid the human realm altogether. Not a word was uttered for the entire 75 minutes. But we did hear a lot of trilling cries and ululations from the troupe of six singers, as they pirouetted and eddied around the stage of the Royal Lyceum Theatre. I imagine those were the non-human entities, having their say — or their squeak.

But what the show lacked in political bite it more than made up for in naive delight. The singers, or dancers — call them what you will — were like sprites, dressed in reconstituted rags and tatters. Sometimes they were like dumb creatures, sometimes they embodied the way Nature expresses itself through ordered, graceful patterns.

These patterns never repeat themselves exactly, a quality Monk beautifully caught in her choreography, and in her very subtly composed music. Often the three instrumentalists standing to one side would set up a gentle modal pattern on keyboards, violin and vibraphone; meanwhile the singers, looking in wonderment at the stars, or drifting about hand-in-hand, would sing phrases that pushed against it.

Occasionally the prevailing calm would be ruffled by sudden alarms of temple bells or drums, the dancer/singers scattering like chaff. Just once Monk herself seemed possessed by pleading anxiety, as if she were a threatened creature asking “Why?”. In a beautiful final image, a thicket of long pendulums descended from above, each set swinging by a dancer. Their colliding, random patterns seemed to say: human agency does not rule everything. Nature does as she pleases.